This week I was tainted by food from China.

Don’t worry, it was nothing serious. On Monday night I made a gorgeous mixed greens salad with chives and mustard greens from our garden and topped it with shaved parmesan cheese, 15-year-old balsamic vinegar, a dash of Persian lime-infused olive oil and a handful of pine nuts.

On Thursday morning, everything I ate tasted horribly bitter. I assumed the worst – that it was the sign of some horrible disease or tooth decay, but I had no other symptoms. After some searching online, I ran across thousands of posts from people who had had the same problem – all of them a few days after eating pine nuts. The common culprit? They were pine nuts imported from China.

Sure enough, I checked the packaging, and the pine nuts I had used in the salad were indeed a product of China.

No one has pinpointed the cause, though some botanists have suggested that a new species of pine may be blamed, or that the triglycerides in the pine nuts from China have been going rancid more quickly than their American and Italian cousins due to less-strict food handling rules. Thankfully, the taste is starting to dissipate, owing to a few chunks of crystallized ginger (also from China, my wife pointed out when I suggested a household boycott) and half a bottle of mouthwash over the last two days, and there are supposedly no lasting effects.

My experience with delayed-aftertaste pine nuts from China is nothing compared to lead-tainted toys, contaminated dog food and toxic drywall, but it got me thinking: When nearly half of all recalls in recent years involve products made in China, why do we put up with it?
It’s cost-savings, obviously, and I can’t fault businesses for seeking out cost controls. American consumers buy cheap goods in bulk, and unless all of your competitors agree to also manufacture everything here, you’ll price yourself out of the market.

So then the real question is, why can’t we find a way to compete with Chinese manufacturing on American soil?

Chinese factory workers make less than 5 percent the average factory wage in the United States, so we’ll never find a way to compete with them on strictly a wage basis. But shipping goods to and from China, transporting executives back and forth, and dealing with import and export hassles is expensive. Surely creative business and government leaders could think of ways to help American factories compete.

Here’s what I propose: Set aside a chunk of land in a state that needs an economic break – hey, how about Michigan? – and try a “mini-China” experiment. It should be a sparsely populated area, but close to major transportation corridors, and relatively close to areas of high unemployment (which could be just about anywhere in our state).

The next step is to effectively “wall off” that area and remove every economic restriction, save for some environmental regulations. No minimum wage. No unions. No overtime rules. No business taxes.

Since the area was sparsely populated, we haven’t forced any minimum-wage workers to take a pay cut, but people who need to work and can’t find work elsewhere will commute or move to that area. Businesses won’t be able to pay too low a wage, either, because they won’t find any workers if they’re only offering truly “Chinese” salaries. However, if the cost of manufacturing goods in “mini-China” is competitive with real China, it will be appealing to businesses.

Most importantly, we won’t allow any businesses to move American plants to “mini-China” – they can only make goods formerly made in China there.

Think about it: You’re an out-of-work former factory worker living in Niles. You used to make $14 an hour, and haven’t been able to find anything for that wage or anything lower, because hundreds of other former factory workers are in the same boat.

“Mini-China” opens down the road, and you have the opportunity to drive 15 minutes away to work for $6 an hour. It’s not great, in fact you can barely live off of it, but your unemployment is running out and you need something, anything.

So you work in “mini-China” for a few months while looking for something else. Now, because a lot of your neighbors in Niles and Dowagiac are also working in “mini-China,” they have money to spend. Not much, but more than the zero they had when they weren’t working at all. Soon, as you and your neighbors begin spending money close to home again, local businesses in the ring around “mini-China” start making money again. Soon, the gas station you and your fellow “mini-Chinese workers” grab your coffee from every morning on your commute is busy enough they need to hire another cashier, and they’ll pay you $8 an hour. Again, it’s not as much as you used to make, but it’s more than zero.
Pretty soon down the line, enough people are moving to the ring around “mini-China” that some smart developer decides he should build an apartment complex close by. You get hired on, along with a few dozen of your former colleagues, to do carpentry work in the apartments for $13 an hour. And as more and more people flock to the communities around “mini-China” to work, the talent pool in the area grows, and it becomes more attractive to American companies who, because they don’t manufacture in China and therefore don’t qualify to manufacture in “mini-China,” want to build a plant right outside it. And that’s when the entire state starts to benefit from “mini-China.”

It’s a far-fetched plan, I admit, and I’m not saying it would work. But I think we’ve decided that just sitting and waiting for manufacturing to return also doesn’t work.

Bryan Clapper is publisher of Leader Publications. He can be reached at 687-7700 or at bryan.clapper@leaderpub.com.